@cas i have not yet tried the raspbian stretch lite released last month , but my experience is that a tight minimal o/s for any of the rpi but particularly the rpi w boards has been hard to find. for that reason i'd favor omega2 but like i say, i have yet to try the newer lite offerings.

@cas
Is there a comparison to be made other than their size & O/S
I'm new to using Omega 'kickstarter Backer' just starting to use it.
Been using Raspberry Pi's for about 12 months, let's just say i've bought 'a lot'
used as servers, digital photo frames, airplane tracking, Seismograph,
Audio players, Retropie & RecalBox Game Consoles and VPN routers to name a few.
Lots of amazing OS's out there for all versions of Pi and uses.
I was hoping the Omega could give me something else to try.

Well, for one thing, the O2's are a lot easier to get ahold of in any quantity. As for the PiZero, it seems that unless you work for the foundation or one of their distributors, you can buy max 1 per order. Sadly, at $30+ per shipment for 1 PiZeroW, that's just ludicrous for my purposes. I've ordered one together with a bunch of other stuff to make the shipping costs worthwhile so I can experiment a bit.

In comparison, I just ordered 10x O2+'s and a couple of OLED expansions and paid shipping of $21. Much more accessible.

I'd forgotten about the small OS footprint as @Douglas-Kryder indicated, but that's also a bonus. I haven't yet investigated how small the Pi 'lite' OS' are, but I'm assuming that you can also roll your own if you only need very basic packages.

In terms of capabilities, I think they're somewhat even now that PiZeroW has been released with onboard wifi. Seems the basics are there, MicroSD, SPI, I2C, I2S and GPIO's. Although the cost of the O2 does increase with the expansions if you want the same ease of access to USB and the GPIO's as you get natively with the PiZero (plus a little soldering of the headers).

The big unknown I have is how easy it is to overcome hurdles in the Pi codebase and how accessible the Pi community is.

In comparison, the community here is quite small, so the knowledge base can be a bit limited as people's time is precious and the Onion Corp staff haven't been involved much for about the last 6 months, so access to their knowledge on particular topics is limited to what you can find in old forum posts and pretty much nothing if the problem is something recent or unique to you. You can always try their helpdesk, but I feel technical problems and their solutions are part of what grows the community and adds to the communal knowledge. It shouldn't be held hostage behind a helpdesk. but that's just MHO.

On the hardware front it seems there are issues with some aspects of SPI (I haven't any direct involvement with that yet - but there are forum posts discussing it - and it seems a manufacturer problem if I recall correctly). And building the firmware with working wifi is hit and miss. @wdu is the only person I've encountered in the forums that has successfully built a recent firmware with working wifi. My attempts have all failed, but I'm also no pro developer so I need working documentation to follow.

I guess I'll find out about the PiZeroW and it's problems when it arrives. :)

going to ditto that, to avoid the rush and running out of pi-zeros the sellers all agreed to one per purchase, and of course nobody has cheap shipping so that adds another half to double the cost. this far down the road dont know why they have not stopped that. The pi community is very hard to compete with not seen anything like that outside avrfreaks (or the arduino community that followed).

they are both linux capable platforms, the pi folks have made good attempts to give userland access to the peripherals in a library fashion so you can use i2c, spi, gpio, etc.

There is also the next thing co C.H.I.P in this price range, but I think you will find that you can also buy in quantity unlike the pi-zero but, dont have the community support.

There is a strong baremetal community on the pi side that would be nice to see on the omega2 if that is of any interest, most folks just want to write an application on top of an os and make api calls though, so someone has had to provide that.

@David-Welch
Baremetal programming sounds interesting, albeit somewhat difficult, if I understand the concept correctly, as it's basically akin to writing your own OS.
Although, sometimes the most satisfaction can be gained from achieving success in really hard adventures. ;-)
So, given I have a few spare O2+'s to break and some time to kill every now and then, how would I go about deciding if this is something worth pursuing? Where is the starting point? Do you have a basic getting started guide on baremetal programming for the O2?

@cas David-Welch has authored a couple very good threads in the last 7-10 days on his experiences with flashing the bootloader. he seemed to finally make a breakthrough on the process just 1 or 2 days ago. i was trying to find those threads to link but they have been deleted from the forum in the past day or so. anyway, his threads were pretty good example at bare-metal attempts. too bad they are gone.

@Douglas-Kryder
Yes, I remember skimming through them at the time, but now they're gone.
Anyway, I'd hazard a guess that the journey starts somewhere with learning MIPS programming at least. The closest I got to baremetal programming was x86 assembler on MS-DOS +/- 25 years ago, so I guess I'll try and reacquaint myself with that while I wait for my "See MIPS Run, 2nd edition" to arrive....